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Monday, December 2, 2013

Dads, Kids, and Bugs...Oh MY!

If there is something that kids love, it is creepy crawly BUGS! My wife doesn't agree as I am the house designated squisher of all things with more than four legs.

Recently, along with another Dad Blogger, Jeff Bogle of Out With the Kids, we launched The Philly Dads Group. It is a social group for dads in the Philly Metro area who want to get together with other dads and families and engage in social activities together.

We had an event hosted by Monkey Fish Toys, a cool indie toy store in Exton, PA. We had pizza, kids drinks, snacks, and of course bugs! When there are kids and food there are usually bugs. These bugs weren't the usual kind though, they were the amazing HexBugs Nano V2 series and #theycanclimb!

The sets for these HexBugs come with a variety of configurations that allow kids to construct intricate "habitats" that the bugs can explore. Think of gerbil habitats with tunnels connecting to one another and that is basically the gist. Only these bugs are not limited by just horizontally running around like little robotic cockroaches. These bugs can climb!

This is a toy that is limited only by one's imagination. In the kids that I observed, they spent most of the time building and putting these bugs to the test. Many times their structures were built and modified thus giving our little engineers some lessons in structural integrity.

I was amazed when I witnessed two bugs on a collision course inside the tunnel thinking "Now that are going to run into one another and get stuck and we will have to take this thing apart" Didn't happen. The two bugs divided one going left and the other right and passed one another like two ships in the night. I couldn't believe my eyes.